Website design is one of the most important elements in the development and continuation of any small business or large corporation. The most effective form of website design in our opinion is the implementation of back-end content management systems (CMS) and with our experiences we have learned that WordPress offers one of the most robust content management systems available to the general public at no cost, sweet right? Yes, of course it is but the unfortunate fact that we have seen is that not all so-called website designers actually know how to utilize this CMS.

So why is the WordPress CMS so important to your small business’s website? Believe it or not there are several reasons you should have a CMS;

Content Density – One of the foundations for determining page relevancy is content, search engines will look at your website and if it is not content rich it will be ignored.
Content Fluidity – Search engines want to see your website’s content changing and being updated, revised and improved upon. Search engines do not like a website that stays the same and is never updated with fresh content.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Friendly Plugins – WordPress offers several plugins that will simplify your website designer’s life by ten fold. Many of these plugins handle it all for you; broken links, heading and meta tags, alt tags, keywords and etc.. You can find these plugins on the WordPress website here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/
Social Networking Plugins – This day and age their are countless social networking sites, wouldn’t it be perfect if a user could navigate your website and find an interesting article or snippet and be able to share it to whatever social networking site they please? Thank god for Share This, a simple one click sharing plugin offered for free here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/share-this/
Twitter, WordPress & Facebook Update Tie-in – Don’t feel like posting updates to each one of these sites? Well this back-end allows for your posts to be fed to Facebook and Twitter simultaneously.
Customize, Customize, Customize – If your website designer is seasoned enough to edit CSS and PHP (the skeleton or structure of WordPress’s back-end), your website will be one lean, mean branded machine!
Interaction and Engagement – You want your users to interact with your website and be able to make comments that you will in turn respond to.
Shopping Cart Implementation – With WordPress you have several options to set your site up as an e-commerce site. At The Web Squad we offer The Squad Cart, which is a shopping cart system programmed and designed by The Web Squad which makes running your e-commerce site a breeze.

Now these are only a few of the benefits of installing the WordPress content management system onto your website but realistically you have to drive it to see if you like it, but if you don’t like it there’s something wrong with you. So let’s move on to how we approach the initial design for your WordPress driven site, what are the elements you as the business owner should think about and provide your website designer?

Site Map – You need to think about how you want your website to be navigated and what parts of your website should have their own sections. Click here for an example of a sitemap.
Color Scheme – The color scheme you decide on should represent your brand.
Module Designation – WordPress offers several modules for you to use you just have to decide which ones you want to use.
Content – One of the most aggravating things a designer comes across is the lack of content provided by the client. So make sure you have your content ready to go or else all you’ll see is a slew of Lorem Ipsum.
Do not over-think – Let your designer do their job and everything will be OK.